Submitting to a Play’s Spell, Without the Stage

Not so long ago in America, keeping up with new plays was part of what it meant to be literate, and publishers did good business by stocking the drama sections in bookstores. New Directions published Tennessee Williams; Atheneum made a bundle from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; Random House issued many plays in hardcover, including “Oklahoma!” in 1943; Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” for Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

If you didn’t live near New York, or couldn’t afford tickets, you picked up the print editions if you wanted to be part of the conversation. Those days, sadly, are pretty much gone. Readers’ eyeballs have fled elsewhere. New plays are hard to find in bookstores. They are issued, if at all, mostly by university presses and boutique publishers.

The excuses for not theater-going are easy to list: it’s hell to find a babysitter, Netflix is a lovely narcotic, and it’s hard to commit to loading that much money onto a Visa card. You could just about fly to Dublin and back for the price of a Broadway ticket and a decent meal. But what’s the excuse for not reading some of these plays?

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Yasmina Reza flings acid dialogue and acknowledges her verbal facility, which never crosses over into glibness, in God of Carnage.Credit
Francois Durand/Getty Images

This year, with Sunday evening’s Tony Awards on the horizon, I decided to, well, act. I got my hands on all four of the best play nominees and sat down to read them, having seen exactly none of the productions. Three can easily be found on Amazon or elsewhere: Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty,” and Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate,” which is published in a volume of his work called “Three Plays.”

The fourth, Moises Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” has not yet been published; I tracked down a copy of the script. (The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined,” was ineligible for a Tony because it has not been performed on Broadway.)

Reading this small pile of plays turned out to be a joy. If none are blinding classics destined to be heavily revived 10 or 50 years hence, the best are as sharp and thrilling and concentrated as first-rate short stories. Even the weaker ones are jangly and distinctive, and I’m not sorry to have made their acquaintance. They linger in the memory the way novels often do not.

Let me start by admitting I’m as guilty as anyone of avoiding the bound versions of new plays. Scanning the list of Tony Award-winning best plays for the past five years — Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife” (2004), John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable” (2005), Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” (2006), Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” (2007) and Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” (2008) — I’m embarrassed to realize I have seen only one (the fiery “August: Osage County”) and read none at all.

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Neil LaButes reasons to be pretty hinges on a plot that sounds like a drunken dinner-party hypothetical: What would you do if ...?Credit
Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images

Theater is a social and collaborative art form, and a playwright’s work is no doubt most fully realized on the stage. But to encounter plays on paper is to encounter them in their platonic form. You’re glued to the playwright’s words, not sitting in Row K jostling for an armrest while gawking at, say, Jane Fonda (who stars in “33 Variations”), wondering if all her years of aerobics paid off. While reading, you can submit more perfectly to the author’s spell and, what’s more, you are your own casting director.

Kenneth Tynan, writing in The New Yorker, once divided the British playwrights of the 1960s into two camps, the “hairy” and the “smooth” — the hairy ones being “embattled” and “socially committed” while the smooth were “cool, apolitical stylists.” As categories go, hairy and smooth are gloriously inexact. But Ms. Reza’s and Mr. LaBute’s plays strike me as the hairy beasts in this foursome; they’re alert, pushy works in which words are hurled like poison darts. Mr. Foote’s and Mr. Kaufman’s are calmer, more self-conscious and a bit less wrigglingly alive, at least on the page.

Ms. Reza is a French playwright and novelist who flings acid dialogue. Her “God of Carnage” is about two 40-something couples who meet to talk things over after one of their sons has clouted the other, knocking out a few of his teeth. This conversation becomes a delightful melee; the couples joust about things from cellphones to miracle drugs to masculinity to Darfur to how to get rid of an unwanted hamster, and it becomes clear that both marriages are hanging by a thread. One character vomits onstage, onto another’s rare art books. A bottle of rum emerges.

The language, in this translation by Christopher Hampton, is fleet and pointed — “Courtesy is a waste of time, it weakens you and undermines you”; “Puking seems to have perked you up” — and Ms. Reza is smart to acknowledge her own verbal facility, which borders on but never crosses over into glibness. (“Do stop shoving these thoughts for the day down our throat,” one character intones.) By the end these excellent characters are, to paraphrase George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” walking what’s left of their scattered, venomous wits.

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Horton Footes Dividing the Estate, about generations arguing over what to do with the family pile, is a bit too easygoing and familiar.Credit
Peter Kramer/Associated Press

My heart sank when I picked up Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty” and read the miserably corny introduction, which would better fit “High School Musical 4.” (“I hope this play makes a case for being yourself and standing up for what you believe in. For being brave.”) But Mr. LaBute does get one thing right, when he declares, “I’ve written about a lot of men who are really little boys at heart, but Greg, the protagonist in his play, just might be one of the few adults I’ve ever tackled.”

The plot of “reasons to be pretty” sounds like a drunken dinner-party hypothetical: What would you do if your boyfriend was overheard talking about the hot new chick at work while referring to your own face as merely “regular”? Greg’s girlfriend goes ballistic and dumps him, even though he genuinely loves her. “You can’t swallow that down,” she says of his comment, “and find a way to come up smiling or anything, you know what I’m saying?”

Line by line, Mr. LaBute’s talk is not particularly artful. The book’s blue-collar setting feels more laid-on than organic. I wish one of his laborers didn’t read Poe and Hawthorne and Swift (even Washington Irving!) at the job site. But “reasons to be pretty” works better than it has any right to. Mr. LaBute is a brute, primal storyteller. You turn the pages.

Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate” comes bound with two of his classic plays, “The Trip to Bountiful” and “The Young Man From Atlanta.” My beef with “Dividing the Estate,” a stately play about several generations arguing about what to do with the old family pile, is mild but it is this: It’s a bit too easygoing and familiar. It feels like something we’ve heard before.

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Moises Kaufman neatly wove a dying musicologists story into Beethovens in 33 Variations, the artiest of the plays.Credit
Peter Kramer/Associated Press

Moises Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” about a dying musicologist investigating why Beethoven spent years teasing out variations on an insignificant waltz, is easily the artiest — I’ll resist saying “pretentious” — play here. According to the stage directions Beethoven’s music plays throughout; his musical sketches are projected; there is a scene in a hospital involving projected X-rays that I bet is mesmerizing onstage.

If I never came to deeply care about the musicologist, Katherine, and about her troubled relationship with her daughter, I admired the way Mr. Kaufman wove her story into Beethoven’s. I read with interest, and the play sent me back to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations with grateful new ears. But about “33 Variations,” I suspect, you had to be there.

I now intend to read the Tony-nominated best plays every season, the same way I get out to see the movies up for best picture at the Academy Awards. It seems like a tradition worth starting.

If you’re going to pick up only one of these plays, make it Ms. Reza’s. When you’re done, you’ll want to say to her what one of her characters says to another: “Every word that comes out of your mouth is destroying me.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Submitting to a Play’s Spell, Without the Stage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe